Out of the Office: Pleth Corporate Retreat 2009
This weekend is our Pleth corporate retreat. Each year my business partners like to take some time away to focus on our business model. We have been successful at doing this too in some pretty cool venues, Las Vegas and Chicago just to name a few, but this year we are taking a little more laid back approach, we will be on Greers Ferry Lake this weekend on a pontoon boat, bouncing ideas off of one another that we have compiled throughout the year.
We have found that this process has helped us to refine our business tremendously. We will of course be examining our current products and service offerings, thinking of ways to improve them, and also doing the whole creative process for new directions.
All of this to say that I am signing off for the weekend and don’t expect to see me back in the office until next week! I do have a blog post on Usability that is scheduled to publish on Saturday but outside of that you probably won’t see much out of me except the occasional twitter or facebook post from me all weekend long, and trust me, I am ready for some R&R…
Oh, and by the way, once we are finished brainstorming this weekend I suspect we will have some new and exciting announcements so be sure to stay tuned to our corporate website (www.pleth.com) and our personal blogs, (www.gregorysmart.com) and (www.kegalsmart.com).
Also, if you are one of our existing clients and have ideas as to how we can improve on our existing products and services, please feel free to comment below, we would love to hear your feedback…
Recent Projects: Belle Corn
My business partner Greg launched a redesign this morning for one of our clients, Belle Corn. He has been working on this project for a few weeks now and I think it turned out great! Since we have been working with Belle Corn, we have gotten to know the owner of the company very well and he has an awesome understanding of how to promote his brand online, and if you work in our industry you come to appreciate that. In fact, I think that Belle Corn and it’s partner company, Cullum Seeds, have won Addy’s in the past for some of their advertising campaigns. You can view the new design at: http://bellecorn.com or click on the screenshot below.
In addition to their new website, we have also assisted Belle Corn to establish a presence on Facebook and Twitter. You can find Belle Corn on Facebook here, and on Twitter here. Below is a screengrab of the Twitter profile page that we implemented for them as well…
We have to also thank the team at Powell Creative, Greg has worked closely with them on this project…
Current Projects: Caring Hands Hospice
In addition to the redesign project we have been working on for Approve Home Medical, I have also been working on a new project for them as well. Caring Hands Hospice is an affiliate of Approve Home Medical Services and is locally owned and operated. The Caring Hands service area includes Independence, Sharp, and Randolph Counties. They also have offices in Batesville and Cherokee Village.
As I mentioned, this is a completely new project seperate from the Approve Home Medical project. We are in the client review phase of this project and awaiting some content so it’s hard to say when the site will launch, but here’s a sneak peek…
Current Projects: Approve Home Medical
It never fails, every time I head out of town for a few days I come back to a mountain of open projects. Fortunately I haven’t had a lot of disruptions the past two days so I have been able to make some headway. One of the projects that I have been working on is a redesign for an existing client, Approve Home Medical.
Approve Home Medical Services is a full service health agency that has been in business since 1988. They service Batesville, Arkansas and a 50 mile radius of Batesville. They also have a new branch office in Cherokee Village which is in Sharp County.
We haven’t launched the redesign yet, but here’s a sneak peak if you are interested:
Recent Projects: MOKSACVPR Redesign
My partners and I have been fortunate enough to call the Missouri-Kansas Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation (MOKSACVPR) clients for about 5 years now. Recently we were in discussion with the MOKSACVPR website committee regarding some updates to their membership registration system and recommended they also allow us to do a light redesign to their existing website. They agreed and I drew this project…
I tried to style their redesign as closely to their existing website as much as possible but added some features and functionality that made the website a lot more user friendly. I am still in the process of hammering out some tweaks to the design, etc., but here’s a screenshot of where I am so far…
Current Projects: Xtreme Green Lawn Service
I was contacted a week or so ago on Facebook by Xtreme-Green Lawn Service about redesigning their website. I have known the owners of Xtreme Green for a long time and have worked on other projects for them over the years. The goal of this project was to take their website and to make it look more professional and to increase their rate of conversion on the website from visitors to actual customers. Xtreme Green operates in the Dallas / Fort Worth area so they have a pretty big focus area, as well as a lot of competitors from both a local and national level.
Content management is an important requirement for this project, they need the ability to post updates easily as well as publish content about their service offerings and specials. With this in mind I started the project with wordpress version 2.8 and have used woo theme as the basis for the design. The client is out of town on vacation this week so I don’t have a preview link for this project yet but I can share a screenshot of where I am at so far…
Current Projects: Judge Karen Baker
I was contacted by Judge Karen Baker a short time ago. She’s planning her campaign for Arkansas Supreme Court. She was needing a website for her campaign so I provided her with a quote. Once I got the go ahead from her I got started. Naturally, content management is one of the projects requirements so I have started with wordpress 2.8 on the backend. I was also telling her during our talks that establishing a political figures page on Facebook and an account on Twitter for the campaign would go a long way toward giving her campaign some exposure so I have created those for her as well. The project isn’t complete yet, we are still waiting on some content but for the most part I have nailed down the design elements.
I have been using Brian Gardner’s studiopress themes for a while now as a starter them for the vast majority of my wordpress designs but about a month or so ago I decided to checkout woo themes after a few developers recommended them to me. This project is built upon a woo theme that I have modified. It’s coming along pretty well so far. I don’t have a launch date for the project to share at this time but here’s a screengrab of what we have so far…
New Project: Crawford for Congress
This has been a pretty busy week for me, I had 3 projects in my lap that are all basically starting from scratch. One of these projects is for Rick Crawford, who is running for Congress in 2010. I have been working with Jonah, Rick’s campaign manager, to put together a game plan for the project. We have arrived at wordpress 2.8 as the base cms and I have already started the process of designing the theme.
I have a rough theme in the works right now that is built upon one of the more dynamic woo themes, but I am lacking some photography and artwork to finalize the design so no sneak peak on this one right now. I should however be able to post an update this next week sometime, stay tuned…
Current Projects: ARALA Launched
I am meeting tomorrow with the Arkansas Residential Assisted Living Association to go over their new CMS for managing their website. As I mentioned the other day, ARALA has been a client for a long time and over the years we have went through a couple different content management solutions. I have no doubts that wordpress is going to be an excellent long-term solution for managing their website content.
Over the next few months I hope to bring all of the remaining clients that we have running cms solutions or frameworks that we hand coded ourselves over into wordpress or modx.
ARALA – Arkansas Residential Assisted Living Association |
Current Projects: OAHCP Redesign
This past week I mentioned that we were in the process of moving over two of our existing clients to wordpress. One of those clients was OAHCP, the Oklahoma Association of Health Care Providers. OAHCP has been one of my clients since 2002 and up until today were using a site that I had hand coded for them. Over the years I have learned a lot about how they use their website to communicate to their members and I realized that Wordpress was a perfect fit for them, you can preview this redesign at www.oahcp.org/cms, it should go live sometime today.
